Community Engagement in a Time of Confinement

Abstract

This article examines the significant constraints on, the necessity for, and the opportunities around community engagement in a time of confinement. We consider the compounded challenges faced by marginalized communities in the context of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, and we follow this with reflections on the triumphs and tensions of emergent engagement practices. We then describe four exercises that we conducted before the onset of the pandemic in a research project exploring public engagement from the ground up in relation to policy-making, and we suggest how the lessons learned may be applied to contemporary decision making. Our overall goal is to illustrate how and why community engagement is particularly pressing in the current crisis, as pandemic restrictions have added new dimensions to long-standing practices of containment. We argue that although these most recent forms of engagement are contested and complex, they are essential to ensuring that policy-making is built on processes of equity, access, and inclusion.